Old Journals

December 2, 1988

Dec 88 from jordan mechner on Vimeo.

Doug wandered into my office today and I gave him the joystick to play with. He was impressed. When he left he said: “I feel like I’ve had an adventure.” I told him I’d have a version in a couple of months that would really be playable. He said: “Seems to me it’s pretty close.”

Also spent a couple of hours with Lauren E., and some good ideas came out of that.

I realized that the 50-level, Lode Runner approach is all wrong. What made Karateka so compelling is that it’s easy. You boot it up and pick up the joystick and it’s obvious what you have to do. You’re there, the guard’s there, he’s in your way. The goal – the bad guy and the princess – is somewhere off to your right, and every step brings you closer. It’s mindless, repetitive – and addictive.

Prince of Persia, with all its elaborate complexity, stretches that thread past the breaking point. The world is so big that the player is lost and confused.

So here’s the new idea: Ten levels. Easy levels. About the same difficulty and amount of game play as Karateka. You start in the dungeon; you end with the princess.

But that’s not the end. The princess gets taken away from you again and you have to go through another, more challenging castle — four castles in all, ten levels each — to win the game and get her for good. Castle four is where we’ll put the really tough levels – for fanatics only, like the last 50 levels of Lode Runner.

At the beginning of the game, story is everything. By the end, it’s practically nothing. The experience distills into pure game play.

So there it is: Slap a story frame on it. Add combat. Design ten easy levels. That’s Prince of Persia. The rest is a bonus.

I’m starting to think there’s no reason to include the level editor with the disk. In a way, it cheapens it.

The real trick will be designing those first ten levels. Finding the right balance of action, strategy, and adventure. That will make the difference between an OK game and a great one. I could slap together ten levels in a day… but it should take weeks. Weeks of watching beginners play, and revising, and finding new beginners to test it out on.

But first: Combat.

Posted on Dec 2, 1988 in Old Journals | 3 comments